As accolades for Manmohan Singh pour in after his death on December 26, it is worth considering the experiences that prepared him for his star turn as finance minister in 1991 and his back-to-back terms as prime minister, 2004-2014. After all, he himself had reminded us of his past in his everyday appearance; he usually sported a turban of Cambridge blue, which served as a reminder of his intellectual roots.
Singh’s education demonstrates the qualities that would define him: first and foremost, his loyalty and his determination. He also had a keen desire to translate academic ideas into concrete policies, and to put into practice the unwavering belief that India needed an economic strategy that was open to trade, let market forces operate, and used economic growth to pay for programmes to improve the lot of the country’s poorest people.
Born into poverty as a colonial subject, Manmohan was raised by his grandparents in the isolated village of Gah, in Pakistan, some 300 km from Lahore. He began his economics education in the subcontinent as it was dividing up. Both he and his university were refugees of Partition, ending up in Amritsar (Singh and his family) and Hoshiarpur (the new East Punjab University). Arriving when some students were housed in tents on campus, Singh nevertheless found intellectual riches – and instructors willing to help him raise his aspirations to the level of his talents.
Topping his undergraduate class, he was invited to continue for an MA there. After that, he had planned to enter the Indian Administrative Service but his teachers encouraged him instead to consider graduate education in England – on the condition that he come back to teach in their department. His teachers-cum-colleagues deputed the doyen of Congress economic policy, I.G. Patel, to sell him on the virtues of Cambridge, at that point the most famous economics faculty in the world. It worked; Singh embarked for England in 1955.
Manmohan arrived at a remarkable moment for Cambridge’s famed Economics Tripos. Legendary South Asian economists like Patel and Dharma Kumar had attended in the 1940s but the next decade saw even more arrive. It started with Amartya Sen and Pakistani Mahbub ul Haq, the inventor of the Human Development Index and a minister of finance. The next year came Jagdish Bhagwati along with Lal Jayawardena, one of the progenitors of the modern Sri Lankan economy, and Rehman Sobhan, a leader in the Bangladeshi independence movement and to this day his country’s national conscience, and then, finally, Singh. Most of the six had first degrees in economics already under their belts, and two (including Singh) earned an MA before returning to undergraduate life. As I show in my forthcoming book, Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin Random House India, spring 2025), Cambridge economics offered its students a broad and practical training that served all six, and of course their classmates, in good stead.
Also read: Manmohan Singh: A Man of Integrity Among the Unscrupulous
Cambridge in those years was a sharply divided place. Singh, characteristically, learned from all sides, praising his studies both with left Keynesian Joan Robinson and with conservative P.T. (later Lord) Bauer. The programme imbued him with a determination to put what he was learning to use – as he quoted one Cambridge economics legend:
“Our impulse is not the philosopher’s impulse, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the physiologist’s, knowledge for the healing that knowledge may help to bring.”
A rarity among his classmates – including his South Asian friends – Singh came from a poor background. He brought with him his parsimonious habits, taking cold showers even in Cambridge’s grey, cold, and dark winters rather than feeding in coins to pay for hot water.
Manmohan, like the rest of this group of six, excelled at Cambridge, which still employed faculty with a colonial mindset about the inadequacy of students from the empire. Five of the six earned first-degree honours; three won the Adam Smith Prize for best economics essay (and two others earned Honourable Mention). Jayawardena and Singh were even named “Apostles,” the nickname for one of Cambridge’s most prestigious literary societies. Even in this remarkable bunch, Singh stood out; he was the lone student in his year (1957) to win first-class honours and, according to one his teachers, outperformed the “firsts” of prior years.
Singh’s fine performance won him invitations for advanced study at Cambridge and elsewhere, as well as promising jobs back home in India. As one of his teachers presciently noted in trying to land him a job at the Planning Commission, “there can be few Indians who would be better qualified as an economist in the Government Service.” Yet Singh’s well-known loyalty led him to fulfil his promise to his alma mater, joining the economics faculty as it relocated to its new home in Chandigarh. He met his obligations with hard work, teaching courses that would have stretched even the best PhD economists, all the while publishing articles that showed his pragmatism and his desire to stay in the middle of the road – he sought solutions, he wrote, that were “not radical but workable.”
Somehow he also found time to meet and marry the singer Gursharan Kaur. As his daughter Daman Singh’s indispensable biographical account of her parents recounts, those were busy but happy days.
Having dispensed with his obligations, Singh at last contemplated doctoral programmes. While his Cambridge professors wanted him to return, Oxford had its own appeals, not least a stipend that would allow Kaur and their infant daughter Upinder to join him.
Oxford, especially Singh’s Nuffield College, was a sharp contrast with Cambridge. For one thing, it offered formal courses on development economics, and those with a distinctly un-Keynesian bent. He chose to write his dissertation on opportunities for Indian exports, a routine topic in much of the world but not India of those days, where mainstream opinion was that India needed rapid industrialisation to achieve self-sufficiency. Leaning against what he called “export fatalism” (later morphing into “export pessimism”), Singh provided a thorough and well-documented assessment of possible export goods, offering detailed recommendations for products, markets, and enterprises. His dissertation steered clear of economic theory and also of ideological pronouncements, reading more like a government briefing paper than an academic work. When I had the chance, in a memorable conversation in 2017, to ask him about this, Singh emphasised moderation – his approach was “middle of the road,” or a “middle way.”
Yet underneath it all was a thoroughgoing attack on the economic verities of the day.
From Oxford, left for the UN in New York, and the Delhi School of Economics after that. By 1971, he had entered government service, never to return to university life. Yet those years of education, at Panjab University, at Cambridge, and at Oxford revealed and also shaped who he would become: a firm believer in freer trade and freer markets – but also in programmes to aid the poor; a self-declared moderate who nevertheless undertook the most radical change in economic policy that India has ever seen; and above all a loyal, humane, and engaged economist for whom “economics” was not a series of abstract theoretical propositions but a path to helping India and Indians raise themselves out of poverty.
David C. Engerman is a scholar of 20th-century international history at Yale University.
